The European Union-U.S. privacy shield will no longer provide more than 5,000 companies with a legal means to transfer personal data from the EU to the United States following a compelling decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union on July 16.

If your company is relying on the privacy shield to transfer personal data from the EU to the U.S., you need to immediately put in place another legal means of transferring such personal data or risk being in violation of the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679, commonly referred to as GDPR. You also could be potentially in breach of contractual requirements with vendors, customers and other third parties, which could include the risk of providing indemnification.